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TAG | Online Marketing
23
Brian Lewis at Online Marketing Summit
0 Comments | Posted by Brittany in Engine Ready, Industry Events
A quick tidbit of information:
Engine Ready’s very own vice president, Brian Lewis, will be a guest speaker at Online Marketing Summit, an online marketing education conference being held this week in sunny San Diego.
Brian will be moderating the PPC vs. SEO: The Ultimate Search Marketing Battle panel, which seeks to finally answer one of the industry’s biggest (and toughest) questions: which is more effective, pay per click or search engine optimization? The panel will start at 10 a.m. on the 25th, the third and final day of the conference, and the debate is sure to be pretty lively, at the very least.
Online Marketing Summit runs from February 22nd to the 25th at the Paradise Point Resort & Spa in San Diego. More information can be found at onlinemarketingsummit.com.
Finally, we’d like to send out a personal invitation to visit us if you attend OMS in San Diego–our offices are only ten minutes away.
If you’re not familiar with Engine Ready’s free software suite, Conversion Critic, you may want to take a moment to utilize some handy online marketing tools. Conversion Critic can be used to evaluate your landing pages, check for broken destination URLs in your pay per click campaigns, and to forecast the performance of your PPC marketing efforts.
The calculator is perfect for computing expectations for a new campaign. Many marketers and business owners want to calculate the risk associated with a new campaign. Accurately forecasting return on ad spend is a challenge shared by all marketers, which the PPC Calculator attempts to relieve.
The free tool will also illustrate how slight changes in the conversion rate or cost per click can significantly impact your bottom line. In the example below we can see that a 0.5% increase in conversion rate (everything else being equal) equates to thousands of more dollars in revenue.
Example:
Slide the button, or manually input your ad spend.
Forecast snapshot of performance.
A recent study released by MidMarketer reveals an interesting, yet self-defeating trend among mid-sized companies trying to minimize the adverse impact of the current economic climate.
First, check out how these companies responded when asked about their level of competency in various areas of marketing:
1. PPC marketing – 66% answered they either understand only a few of the basics or have no clue where to start;
2. Organic SEO – 64% answered they either understand only a few of the basics or have no clue where to start.
3. 80% found the ability to measure marketing effectiveness a challenge.
When asked, Do you have plans to address your problem marketing areas?, only 35% answered they would outsource or hire a specialist. The remaining almost 2/3 said they either don’t have time to address the problem areas or would try to learn it themselves.
This is despite the fact that heavy workload represents the biggest hardship for this MidMarketer sample group.
Remember that these are not mom and pop operations. Over one half of the survey participants have a marketing staff between 2 and 12 people.
If you’re struggling with online marketing, trying to learn it on your own and not sure how to measure success, you’re not alone. You’re also missing a tremendous opportunity to pull ahead of your competition that may be feeling the same pain.
Hire an expert or outsource to an experienced reputable agency. If your ROI (loaded with the new costs) doesn’t improve, fire them and find another.
Stand on the sidelines because you don’t have enough time, though, and you’re destined to lose.
And if you’re trying to learn PPC and SEO when your heavy workload permits, remember that you’re competing with experienced online marketing specialists and agencies, who’ve benefited from testing numerous “behind-the-scenes” strategies for years.
This is one area where “biting the bullet” just won’t pay off.